So, if you are a travel company seeking to push some deals or tout your brand, or you are a consumer looking for bargains that aren't stale, Twitter search gives you an immediate, fresh way to go bargain hunting and soothe your wanderlust.

The new home page, with its emphasize on search, is an unsophisticated test that undoubtedly will evolve and force changes at search engines like Google and travel metasearch engines, too.

Contrast the Twitter Cancun vacation search with a Google search of the keywords.

The Google search for Cancun Vacations is dominated by paid ads -- something the Twitter search hasn't dabbled with yet.

The Google local business results for Cancun vacation include a map pinpointing the locations of the relevant businesses. There are no maps in the Twitter results for now, but the tweets provide more of a sense of immediacy than the Google results.

To its credit, the first Google organic search result after the local business results is a link to Orbitz for Cancun packages and hotels, a relevant result.

I'm not saying that one search mode -- Google's or Twitter's -- is better than the other (although Google has had a lot more time and resources to define its search algorithms, of course). Twitter is a newbie in all of this.

But, what I am saying is that Twitter search will change Google, Bing, Facebook and Kayak, as well as Carnival Cruise Lines, JetBlue, Hertz and Mark Travel.

Make your own list.

With the introduction of Twitter's new home page, we witnessed the start of something big today.

15 comments:

For me it's as simple as this: Twitter just transformed itself from a-misunderstood-by-the masses-but-loved-by-some-app to universally useful platform.

While it's been the fastest growing social network in terms of users over the last several months (and is clearly the media darling right now) there's also been a lot of churn oi new users. For every passionate power user, there were many folks who dabbled and dashed.

Their new UI and focus on search will bring the casual user back, and the fact that you don't have to be logged in to access the content is a tipping point in my opinion.

This will bring me back to Twitter daily to keep an eye on the industry and look for new opportunities.

Watch Twitter's daily visits the next 2 months. Don't be surprised if it leaps by an order of magnitude, as the casual user begins to visit Twitter as a *search engine* alternative to Bing, and yes, Google.

Hi Dennis interesting post.As a logged in Twitter user I didn't see the change you mentioned until I signed out. I could then see the new Twitter home page they talked about in their blog post.

I thought it was very interesting Twitter now wants to let web users see what is happening on Twitter before they have an account I expect to increase the speed of their growth or help offset the abandonment rate.

Perhaps this relaunched homep[age feature is mainly aimed at new users rather than many current who would never see it as we're logged in or using via a third party app.

Yes, that is a huge point that a user can access Twitter search without being logged-in ie without registering for Twitter. That will bring a lot of people to Twitter search as an alternative, and not a replacement at this early stage, for Google and Bing search. It will be interesting to see how this drives up Twitter's already soaring traffic numbers.

It still seems that Twitter is most useful when incorporated into third party apps rather than a search tool in its own right.

As self-serving as this may sounds (and it is!) we set twavel.com up in recognition of the fact that when a traveller searches Twitter itself the majority of the results are irrelevant, as you noted yourself.

I do think Twitter has tremendous potential for time sensitive travel topics like deals, delays, weather conditions, and news.

Your post highlights the potential of Twitter.

But the real potential will only be realized by people who build apps utilizing the Twitter "plumbing" of social connections, reputation, and messaging, to focus on the issue of Travel Deals or Travel Advice/Recommendations.

Twitter of today may be "microblogging" or a social network. But Twitter of tomorrow will be a social application toolkit that will enable new applications that we are only right now dreaming up. I haven't seen Twavel.com, but I have seen Buzz.Trazzler.com. The best example I can think of is StockTwits, which is a social network based version of Bloomberg, providing stock tips and investment advice from the Twitter community. Also, my friend Dexin launched Tweetbrain.com, a Q&A site that allows you to ask questions and get answers, essentially a Yahoo Answers that utilizing Twitter. Mahalo Answers is also doing something similar.

Twitter's open API will enable people to create applications on top of Twitter to solve specific problems. This will deal with the signal to noise ratio currently on Twitter.

If I were TravelZoo, Sherman's, SmarterTravel, or DealBase, I would think about building a deal-oriented application that rides on top of Twitter like StockTwits, and I would invite suppliers to post their deals on Twitter and on my application. The first to use "lethal generosity" in aggregating deals will win, and that audience will just support their other distribution channels (e.g. email, Web) that promise NOT to go away, even with the emergence of Twitter.

Elliott: Great point about APIs built to Twitter as getting a handle on "the signal to noise ratio currently on Twitter."

I'm sure Twitter itself will fine-tune Twitter search going forward, but the real innovation probably will play out in a form that you outlined.

What a shame it is that the travel industry generally can't let its competitive juices flow om a similar manner. I wrote about Farelogix giving it a go http://bit.ly/1429y7 in its open source experiment.

But, as Valyn Perini of Open Travel Alliance pointed out in a comment, tour operators and hoteliers at a recent confab couldn't even agree on which of them mandates the use of faxes about room blocks.

Twitter Travel Search will get a lot more innovation faster than the legacy-gripping portion of the travel industry.

A key element about Twitter Search, and Twitter in general, is the real time nature of the information flowing through it. This is the key differentiator and user benefit to using Twitter Search vs. Google.

For example, there was some police activity in our neighborhood last year, and I turned to Twitter which had details on what was happening 45 minutes before any news outlets.

We feel that to be successful with deals on Twitter, the deals need to have a real time component to them, such as a short lifespan ("this coupon will self descruct in 90 minutes"). For travel, this concept would manifest as deals involving distressed product with a limited time to book or a small amount of inventory.

I'd expect some interesting things from the Gilt team in this regard.

That said, only a small percentage of travel is spontaneous, so does that mean that the travel category on twitter will be smaller than those which have a propensity for spontaneous purchases - i.e. clothing, coffee shops, electroncs, media, virtual goods?

I've had Twitter results integrated w/Google using FF/Greasemonkey for sometime now - I can't imagine living without it. Both real-time conversation and web results together make an incredibly useful tool.

The use of hashtags now becomes even more important - but I fear the Spammers will ruin this for us.

Great postThree thoughts.1) This potential was already there when they incorporated search into their site. Has nothing to do with this new look and feel2) Recently I notice that twitter flushes its search caches considerably more frequent and thouroughly than it used to do a couple of months ago. I presume because they still have problems with their capacity. This curtails the usefullness of their search results. You can only search the now as Claude points out.3) future sidebuilders now need to incorporate dedicated Twitter search into their sites (blogs) I see on the otherhand Google putting more emphasis on real time results that static info.....

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I've followed online travel, its twists, turns and detours, since the beginning (not Adam and Eve, but Rich and Terry), and will follow the aforesaid in this blog. I'm North America editor of Tnooz and I write USA Today's Digital Traveler column. Things not in my resume: I visited Orbitz headquarters pre-launch in 2000 and, left unattended, eavesdropped and examined the whiteboards to learn partnership details; Travelocity's ex-CEO Michelle Peluso credits me with her success (Wharton notwithstanding) after I wrote a sentence (with accompanying photo) mentioning that some of her Site59 women wore fishnet stockings and then airline execs kept the phone lines busy; I once drove to tiny Sherman, Conn., to see where PhoCusWright lives; and I was a nachtportier in a West Berlin hotel in the days (Btw) when a nasty wall split the city. Fyi, the previous stuff wasn't necessarily in chronological order.

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The opinions I express in the Dennis Schaal Blog are my own. Only I could think of this stuff. The opinions uttered or written here in no way reflect on the views of past employers, current partners, future associations (how could they anyway?) or my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Slayton. I don't have a lawyer, but if I had one, he or she probably would have told me to write something like this. Well, maybe not exactly. The Dennis Schaal Blog is Copyright (c) 2009 by Dennis Schaal. All rights reserved.